I'm not complaining about the ruling- I now have an excuse to build another ant but I was just thinking that if the metal armour rules are discussed in the future, this could be a possible solution.
Until then though, i intend to keep Ant Awe for demos at Roaming Robots & Robots Live and build a separate ant if i decide to attend an AWS.
Well should the vote come up again I would vote to have it removed again. Not that I have any plans of milling an ant out of a solid billet of metal, but I feel the people should be free to build as they please as long as their robots are built safely and within the weight and size limit.
The argument that axes won't have a chance if the rule is pulled out would imply there is a chance they would now, and I don't think there is enough energy to be stored in any antweight axe or hammer to be effective. You just don't have the mass.
The only coherent argument that I could detect to keep the rule was the "two tin boxes against each other" one, and I'm not sure that holds a lot of water (to mix my metaphors) but I think that the main reason that people voted to keep the rule was that they didn't want to change it!
1mm armour rule This will be taken out of the new rules (4.1??) The argument was that thicker plastics and other materials could be used, thus there was no reason to keep this rule.
Monocoques/continous metal armour. There was quite a discussion about this, in the end we decided to keep this rule. It may change in the future but currently there is no need to change it.
olivers wrote:Monocoques/continous metal armour. There was quite a discussion about this, in the end we decided to keep this rule. It may change in the future but currently there is no need to change it.
This is where I have a problem with that. This rule is a restriction, and though I am in favor of restrictions when they improve safety for instance, when there isn't a sufficient reason to keep a rule, I submit that there is a reason to change it, possibly even remove it.
Keeping a rule in because "it has always been in there" is not a valid reason in my opinion.
I agree Leo keeping a rule just because it has always been there is not a valid reason and was not why people voted to keep it.
I and I believe others voted to keep the rule for the reasons I stated before.
Leo the motivation was to stop people from building robots machined out of one piece of solid bar that would be impervious to weapons. True that spinners have now progressed to the state that they can do damage or at least launch them out of the arena but any possible use of axes, hammers or crushers would be just about impossible. We haven't had any that can really deal with plastic yet let alone titainium.
but I was just thinking that if the metal armour rules are discussed in the future, this could be a possible solution.
